


His Call

by Telaryn



Category: Leverage
Genre: Developing Relationship, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Protectiveness, Questioning, Rescue, Team Bonding, Team Dynamics, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-25
Updated: 2012-09-25
Packaged: 2017-11-15 01:18:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/521559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Telaryn/pseuds/Telaryn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Following the team's relocation to Portland, Nate discovers that something has happened to Quinn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	His Call

 

  
Nate didn’t bother turning around when Sophie joined him on the balcony. The lights of Portland at night were already blazing in front of them – he was still trying to get used to the sight. Boston had been his city in a way Portland still wasn’t, and Los Angeles had never had to be. It was hard making the shift.

“I didn’t realize you were keeping track of him,” Sophie said, leaning her forearms against the railing and following Nate’s gaze. “You had that information almost before Hardison did, and by Eliot’s own admission Quinn’s a hard man to find.”

“Finding him can be difficult,” Nate agreed. “Tracking him once you’ve found him? Not as hard as you’d think.”

“Eliot’s going to want to go after him,” Sophie said after another moment.

“That’s his call.” The response was automatic, but Nate really did mean it. He would have had to be as blind as his team kept insisting he was not to notice that Eliot had developed strong feelings for his fellow hitter. Learning that Quinn was in an Iranian jail, facing almost certain torture and execution, was likely to prompt an immediate and not entirely rational response.

“Are we going to back him up?” Sophie asked, leaning into him. Nate knew she liked the idea of their being a connection between the two young men, but that didn’t change the fact that this was a situation where they would be desperately out of their depth.

“Again, that’s his call,” Nate repeated. The world of a mercenary was something he’d never looked too closely at – not even back in the days when he’d been profiling Eliot as a part of his legitimate work. Back then Eliot had only been his problem when he was stealing priceless artifacts for his underworld clients. If he was off destabilizing a third world government, he was immediately the problem of somebody well above Nate’s pay grade.

The door behind them opened. “He’s here,” Hardison said.

Nate turned to Sophie. “His call,” he repeated, leaning in and kissing her lightly on the lips. “Remember.”  
***********************  
Eliot was inside the apartment, staring at the wall of monitors and feeling like he’d been punched in the gut. _You stupid son of a bitch,_ he thought, scanning the intel on Quinn’s last known location. _No fee’s worth that!_ The really frustrating part was that back in the day it would have been Quinn trying to get Eliot to accept that truth. Even though they were evenly matched in their martial abilities and Eliot’s reputation was arguably slightly better, Quinn had been in the game longer. _You should have known better._

Nate and Sophie reentering the apartment caught his attention. “You shouldn’t be tracking him like this,” Eliot protested, knowing Nate would have been careful but still needing to lash out at _something_. “You could get him killed.”

Hardison drew breath, but Nate cut him off with a look. Eliot met the older man’s eyes, grateful for the intervention. “I’m going after him.”

“I know,” Nate said. “What do you need from us?”

He was sorely tempted to say nothing. _Cut them loose._ This was the part of his life he spent so much time and energy protecting them from, that the response was automatic.

The center photo of Quinn caught his attention again. Parker had taken it their last night in Boston; Archie had insisted on taking the team to dinner to celebrate their victory over Dubenich and Lattimore. Eliot had been tempted to bow out when Nate and Sophie did, but Hardison had subjected him to nearly ten minutes of desperate whining and pleading and he’d ultimately given in.

It was only when he’d reached the restaurant that he realized Parker had invited Quinn. “He wanted to shoot Dubenich,” she said, when he’d cornered her asking why. “And he’s nice to Archie and you. I like him.”

Her response had been so very Parker that Eliot had forgiven her on the spot. And later, when he and Quinn had retreated to the other man’s hotel room…

“Help me,” he said abruptly, looking at Nate again and letting his instincts guide him. “I can’t turn my back on this.”

Nate was silent for a moment; then the mastermind nodded. “Tell us what you need.”  
*************  
The longer he’d survived in the game, the more Quinn realized he’d been spending a lot of his down-time fantasizing about his death. He tried not to worry about it – tried to convince himself that a certain morbid fascination was normal for someone in his position – but all the rationalization in the world couldn’t stop him from lying awake at night wondering about how it was finally going to happen…how he was finally going to leave the game.

 _This wouldn’t have been my first choice,_ he thought, trying to find a more comfortable position in the back of the truck. They hadn’t been gentle about loading him in; the few bench seats were claimed by his guards, which left him plenty of room, but not a lot of stability. After several painful jarring movements as the truck bounced over the uneven desert road, he managed to wedge himself in the corner, bracing himself with his feet – his legs spread as far apart as he could manage without aggravating the slices and burns along his inner thighs.

 _I should have known better,_ he thought, trying unsuccessfully to relieve the pressure of the cuffs cutting into his wrists. No fee was worth ending up like this. “You know, we could have just done take out,” he quipped, knowing his guards wouldn’t react. Like most zealots, they were desperately deficient in the humor department.

They were also predictably lacking in imagination, which meant Quinn didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand that this trip was going to end with him on his knees in the sand and a bullet entering the back of his skull at close range. The only bright spot in this scenario was that he wasn’t a high enough value prisoner for his captors to waste time beheading him. Beheading would have been a messy and unnecessarily painful way to go. _Too much margin for error._

The truck finally bounced to a halt, jarring him so completely Quinn suspected he was hurt in places he hadn’t even considered yet. He stayed where he was, focusing on steadying his breathing and his suddenly racing heartbeat. _No reason to rush into this,_ he thought as most of his guards spilled out the back of the truck.

The two biggest – ironically the ones he’d hurt the most before they’d managed to subdue him – closed in on him. “No hard feeling, huh fellas?” he quipped, giving them a shadow of his usual cocky grin. As comebacks went it was hardly his best, but now that he’d arrived at the likely end of his road Quinn was starting to realize that he wasn’t ready to die yet.

Grinning stupidly, the two men each grabbed an arm and dragged him to the rear of the truck. The lingering question of whether one of his ribs was cracked or broken was abruptly answered when they pitched him out the back. Pain lit Quinn’s world as he struck the packed sand brutally hard, and he tasted blood in his mouth.

On the verge of passing out, he was suddenly dimly aware of new voices joining the conversation. One of them spoke passable Persian, but his accent was horrible. The other one might as well have been a native speaker; his voice was low and rough, but his command of the language was very good. _”While we appreciate that you have your reasons, I must ask that you refrain from damaging him further.”_

Quinn’s heart leapt as his sluggish brain finally realized that both voices were familiar to him, and finally made the connection as to where. _Son of a bitch._

He was laughing like a madman when Eliot Spencer finally moved into his line of sight.  
****************  
They’d almost been too late. Eliot hadn’t needed to get close to Quinn to understand the truth of that; a thousand tiny visual clues, plus his own experiences with what the Iranian military was capable of, told him better than any kind of up close examination how badly injured his fellow hitter was. He ended up drawing heavily on Nate’s steadying presence to keep himself together and get the three of them clear of danger.

Once they had Quinn secured in a private hospital under a doctor’s care, Eliot excused himself. Parker made as if she was going to follow him, but Sophie waved her down. Nate had already disappeared – his hatred of hospitals getting the better of him in the end.

 _This shouldn’t be getting to me._ It was the one thing he kept trying to tell himself - _had_ been trying to tell himself ever since he’d learned about Quinn’s capture. _Not this badly._ Even the thought of Quinn unconscious in a hospital bed, hooked up to tubes and monitors, had him half out of his mind.

“You have feelings for him.”

Laughing bitterly, Eliot ducked his head – running shaking hands through his tangled hair. “Didn’t need you to tell me that, Sophie,” he said, turning to face the dark-haired grifter. “There’s only one thing that ever twists me up this bad inside.”

Sophie hugged her arms across her chest, her expression thoughtful. “The doctors say he’s going to be okay.”

Eliot’s answering smile was rueful. “The doctors aren’t saying anything, Sophie. They never say anything.” _Cautiously optimistic._ Until they moved Quinn out of ICU, Eliot knew from long experience it was the best he could hope to hear. “I just…I want to hurt somebody for what they did to him.” The admission slipped out – he hadn’t intended to get any deeper into his feelings while they were so churned up. _You’ve got this way of bringing things into the light,_ he thought, staring at Sophie.

“What’s wrong with that?” she asked. “You’re protective of the people you care about – it’s got to hurt wanting revenge and not being able to get it.”

“First of all,” Eliot said, chuckling bitterly, “I have no idea if Quinn feels anything for me.” They’d been together a couple of times, and they’d interacted long enough that Eliot felt comfortable saying they were friends. _More than that..?_ It was a difficult question to explore and keep his sanity intact.

“Second?” Sophie prompted, rousing Eliot from his introspection.

“Second, even if there is something between us, I can’t ask him not to put himself in these kinds of situations. I know what I’d do in his shoes, and I’m really not sure this is a situation either one of us needs to be thinking about getting into.” He could tell he was starting to babble and exhaled sharply, trying to keep himself under control.

Blue eyes full of emotion, Sophie leaned in and kissed him gently on the cheek. “Maybe that’s something you need to be discussing with each other.”


End file.
